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[For newcomers to these essays: “Doc Joc” is Ms. Donelle Cooley’s back formation from the LiveJournal username “joculum,” which is Mr. Grady Harris’ pun on Dr. Jerry Cullum’s onetime e-mail address at his place of longtime employment, “jcullum” [at] the art magazine in question. “Joculum” is Late Latin for “little joke” as a noun, or if taken as a verb, “I’m kidding.” More than you wanted to know.]
“Authorization [Kripal’s terminology, defined early in the book, involves a fair amount of self-conscious punning] begins when we decide to step out of the script we now know ourselves to be caught in and begin to write ourselves anew. If Realization is the insight that we are being written, Authorization is the decision to do something about it. If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal writing us, Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writing us.” [Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, p. 254.]
Almost everyone with any degree of intellectual seriousness agrees that we are written, even though we think we are doing the writing. The academic disciplines differ only on the question of what or who is writing us, whether the writing is an intentional act or a random accident or a combination of the two, and whether we can become the authors of our own stories—in all the senses of that ambiguous phrase. There is nothing controversial about the overall assertion, once we accept that the word “writing” is an all-encompassing metaphor used in different ways in different disciplines—and it is astonishing how many philosophers and social scientists have no comprehension of the functions of metaphor, much less of the other strategies of poetry, fiction, and rhetoric.
Kripal focuses on the paradoxical nature of paranormal experience, something that is always invented by us at least as much as it is imposed on us from outside. What he neglects to mention is that our purportedly normal experience is constructed identically.
(What do I mean, “purportedly”? “Normal” is what we or our social order choose to call normal, while “everyday” is what, well, actually happens every day, whether we notice it or not. For some social orders, what we call miracles are considered normal occurrences, perceived every day by somebody in the social order—but that takes us too far afield, into anthropological territory. I want to get to a different piece of intellectual turf.)
We don’t notice that what the phenomenologists used to call our life-world is a construct that combines our cultural and personal experience with the environment that sustains us and presents us with challenges—the complex of material substrates interacting independently of our volition or even of our conscious attention. (Our own bodies are part of this complex of material substrates, of course.)
Hence the dialectic with which Kripal begins his book (which is mostly but not entirely about the cultural and existential history of the topics named in his subtitle) is already inadequate, even though it would be controversial for the hardcore cultural constructionists who dominate university departments: “Drawing on such real-world theater [Kripal has just cited an incredibly strange coincidental encounter that Dan Aykroyd experienced during a cellphone conference with Britney Spears “about an upcoming Saturday Night Live gig”], I want to suggest that the psyche and our social consensus of what reality is somehow ‘make each other up’ within a constant loop of Consciousness and Culture, and that the Culture through which Consciousness often manifests itself most dramatically as the paranormal is that form in which the imagination (and so the image) are given the freest and boldest reign: populqr culture. You will find here, then, no proofs or debunking of this or that extraordinary experience…. I am neither a denying debunker nor a true believer, and anyone who reads me as either is misreading me.” [Kripal, op. cit., p. 5]
This definition leaves out of account the environing world in which both we and the paranormal live and move and have our being, and which itself lives and moves and does its thing pretty much without taking notice of us, insofar as anything (us included) ever takes notice of anything rather than reacting mechanistically to it.
But “the scale creates the phenomenon”; as was noted in an analogy used by both Mircea Eliade and the person I have previously christened He Who Is Not To Be Named In This Journal (Except When He Is), if we begin with the molecular structure of the elephant, we shall never get far enough up the scale of complex interactions to say very much about the behavior of the elephant. If we begin differently, with the environment that sustains the elephant, we shall find it possible to get to not only the behavior but also the diseases of the elephant. This may give us the illusion that we’ve really gotten at the core of the issue, but we won’t know a great deal about the anatomical structure that makes possible the elephant’s particular way of being in the world—though we can get there, too, if we count the force of gravity as one of the elements of the environment, which of course it is. But very few ecologists consider it necessary to think about how plants and animals adapt their dealings with one another to cope with a constant force—gravity—that affects them profoundly in its consequences. (They do think about sunlight, which is not a constant force because climatic factors determine its intensity.)
If we start by discussing why birds, lizards, and lemurs can and sometimes do live in trees and elephants do not, we shall be suspected of belaboring the obvious; and so we are. For in spite of the common expression, very few people actually have a firm grasp on the obvious—since it is too obvious to pay it any mind, and people laugh and point when someone does pay attention to it.
Now, I had pretty much learned all of the foregoing forty years ago, from the phenomenologists and the process philosophers and the historians of religion and the philosophers of biology, not to mention some of the papers in the Eranos Yearbooks. What Kripal adds to the discussion (and what we—those of us who care about such things—are still trying to figure out, if we ever can) is the question of where the borders of human experience can be drawn, and what the elusive causative factors involved in human experience actually are.
The fact that the human experience is not what the telling American metaphor would call The Whole Shooting Match is necessarily left out of consideration. From that perspective, reality is always already paranormal, since what we call “normal” is a reality limited not only by our social choices of what to notice, but by the way in which consciousness functions as a reducing mechanism fostering survival. (I am not repeating myself. Approaching the problem via the individual consciousness adds a dimension to the social perspective, as Kripal noted.)
I have been writing this for five or six years, albeit seldom very clearly. But since all of this has been known for nearly half a century—though all too seldom put together consistently—and has merely been clarified by the discoveries of neurology and evolutionary psychology, I am puzzled by why so many folks get all excited by theories that they seem to think are new and controversial. (The other night I attended a discussion of the five-year-old philosophical movement called “speculative realism,” which seems to be about as mature and perceptive as most five-year-olds, so maybe it will turn into something when it grows up.)
If we can’t agree on this much, on the basic knowledge we have had for half a century, we can’t agree on anything. Wait a minute…given the current condition of discussions of the global economy and the global environment, I guess we can’t agree on anything. And this is probably going to kill us as a species, long before the planet itself evaporates in a solar holocaust.
…Kripal’s book also has lots of comic book art in it, but discussions of the interpretation of visual evidence versus verbal structures within which that evidence is discussed would be a topic for another post. He doesn’t get much beyond the necessity of engaging the non-verbal parts of the brain, but at least he raises the question. To do more than that would be akin to beginning a discussion of superhero comics with the history of illustrated broadsides of marvels and mysteries in the early days of printing, or with the drawing of a shaman in the Lascaux cave—defensible on one level, but akin to starting a discussion of environmental degradation in Africa with the likeliest models for the evolution of the bone structure of the elephant.
I, of course, typically try to discuss the bone structure of the elephant, after which I relate the current condition of its bone structure to the issue of the degradation of its environment; then I discuss the botany of that environment and how that relates to the overall degradation, then I discuss the nature of the wind currents that affect both flora and fauna, including the overall physics of the question and why I don’t quite understand the math involved and beg for someone to explain it to me, before I circle back to talk about the reproductive life of the elephant (affected by environmental degradation) in joky and slightly salacious terms* and then conclude, for reasons clear to myself but not to my readers, with an analysis of the metaphoric uses of the elephant in human social orders, particularly in pop culture and in printed literature including the memorably insane tome distributed free of charge by a mysterious stranger one year at the American Academy of Religion conference, “I Have Found an Elephant in the Bible.”
All of these are perfectly valid topics for discussion, but cramming them all into 1500 words is a bit much. No wonder nobody has understood my main points in six years of my trying to make them.
Are you still reading this? Good, because I will give ten dollars to the first forty people who…no, actually, I won’t.
*Jeff Kripal engages in similarly serious discourse punctuated by jokiness and occasional decorous salaciousness. He’s my kind of writer.
“Authorization [Kripal’s terminology, defined early in the book, involves a fair amount of self-conscious punning] begins when we decide to step out of the script we now know ourselves to be caught in and begin to write ourselves anew. If Realization is the insight that we are being written, Authorization is the decision to do something about it. If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal writing us, Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writing us.” [Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, p. 254.]
Almost everyone with any degree of intellectual seriousness agrees that we are written, even though we think we are doing the writing. The academic disciplines differ only on the question of what or who is writing us, whether the writing is an intentional act or a random accident or a combination of the two, and whether we can become the authors of our own stories—in all the senses of that ambiguous phrase. There is nothing controversial about the overall assertion, once we accept that the word “writing” is an all-encompassing metaphor used in different ways in different disciplines—and it is astonishing how many philosophers and social scientists have no comprehension of the functions of metaphor, much less of the other strategies of poetry, fiction, and rhetoric.
Kripal focuses on the paradoxical nature of paranormal experience, something that is always invented by us at least as much as it is imposed on us from outside. What he neglects to mention is that our purportedly normal experience is constructed identically.
(What do I mean, “purportedly”? “Normal” is what we or our social order choose to call normal, while “everyday” is what, well, actually happens every day, whether we notice it or not. For some social orders, what we call miracles are considered normal occurrences, perceived every day by somebody in the social order—but that takes us too far afield, into anthropological territory. I want to get to a different piece of intellectual turf.)
We don’t notice that what the phenomenologists used to call our life-world is a construct that combines our cultural and personal experience with the environment that sustains us and presents us with challenges—the complex of material substrates interacting independently of our volition or even of our conscious attention. (Our own bodies are part of this complex of material substrates, of course.)
Hence the dialectic with which Kripal begins his book (which is mostly but not entirely about the cultural and existential history of the topics named in his subtitle) is already inadequate, even though it would be controversial for the hardcore cultural constructionists who dominate university departments: “Drawing on such real-world theater [Kripal has just cited an incredibly strange coincidental encounter that Dan Aykroyd experienced during a cellphone conference with Britney Spears “about an upcoming Saturday Night Live gig”], I want to suggest that the psyche and our social consensus of what reality is somehow ‘make each other up’ within a constant loop of Consciousness and Culture, and that the Culture through which Consciousness often manifests itself most dramatically as the paranormal is that form in which the imagination (and so the image) are given the freest and boldest reign: populqr culture. You will find here, then, no proofs or debunking of this or that extraordinary experience…. I am neither a denying debunker nor a true believer, and anyone who reads me as either is misreading me.” [Kripal, op. cit., p. 5]
This definition leaves out of account the environing world in which both we and the paranormal live and move and have our being, and which itself lives and moves and does its thing pretty much without taking notice of us, insofar as anything (us included) ever takes notice of anything rather than reacting mechanistically to it.
But “the scale creates the phenomenon”; as was noted in an analogy used by both Mircea Eliade and the person I have previously christened He Who Is Not To Be Named In This Journal (Except When He Is), if we begin with the molecular structure of the elephant, we shall never get far enough up the scale of complex interactions to say very much about the behavior of the elephant. If we begin differently, with the environment that sustains the elephant, we shall find it possible to get to not only the behavior but also the diseases of the elephant. This may give us the illusion that we’ve really gotten at the core of the issue, but we won’t know a great deal about the anatomical structure that makes possible the elephant’s particular way of being in the world—though we can get there, too, if we count the force of gravity as one of the elements of the environment, which of course it is. But very few ecologists consider it necessary to think about how plants and animals adapt their dealings with one another to cope with a constant force—gravity—that affects them profoundly in its consequences. (They do think about sunlight, which is not a constant force because climatic factors determine its intensity.)
If we start by discussing why birds, lizards, and lemurs can and sometimes do live in trees and elephants do not, we shall be suspected of belaboring the obvious; and so we are. For in spite of the common expression, very few people actually have a firm grasp on the obvious—since it is too obvious to pay it any mind, and people laugh and point when someone does pay attention to it.
Now, I had pretty much learned all of the foregoing forty years ago, from the phenomenologists and the process philosophers and the historians of religion and the philosophers of biology, not to mention some of the papers in the Eranos Yearbooks. What Kripal adds to the discussion (and what we—those of us who care about such things—are still trying to figure out, if we ever can) is the question of where the borders of human experience can be drawn, and what the elusive causative factors involved in human experience actually are.
The fact that the human experience is not what the telling American metaphor would call The Whole Shooting Match is necessarily left out of consideration. From that perspective, reality is always already paranormal, since what we call “normal” is a reality limited not only by our social choices of what to notice, but by the way in which consciousness functions as a reducing mechanism fostering survival. (I am not repeating myself. Approaching the problem via the individual consciousness adds a dimension to the social perspective, as Kripal noted.)
I have been writing this for five or six years, albeit seldom very clearly. But since all of this has been known for nearly half a century—though all too seldom put together consistently—and has merely been clarified by the discoveries of neurology and evolutionary psychology, I am puzzled by why so many folks get all excited by theories that they seem to think are new and controversial. (The other night I attended a discussion of the five-year-old philosophical movement called “speculative realism,” which seems to be about as mature and perceptive as most five-year-olds, so maybe it will turn into something when it grows up.)
If we can’t agree on this much, on the basic knowledge we have had for half a century, we can’t agree on anything. Wait a minute…given the current condition of discussions of the global economy and the global environment, I guess we can’t agree on anything. And this is probably going to kill us as a species, long before the planet itself evaporates in a solar holocaust.
…Kripal’s book also has lots of comic book art in it, but discussions of the interpretation of visual evidence versus verbal structures within which that evidence is discussed would be a topic for another post. He doesn’t get much beyond the necessity of engaging the non-verbal parts of the brain, but at least he raises the question. To do more than that would be akin to beginning a discussion of superhero comics with the history of illustrated broadsides of marvels and mysteries in the early days of printing, or with the drawing of a shaman in the Lascaux cave—defensible on one level, but akin to starting a discussion of environmental degradation in Africa with the likeliest models for the evolution of the bone structure of the elephant.
I, of course, typically try to discuss the bone structure of the elephant, after which I relate the current condition of its bone structure to the issue of the degradation of its environment; then I discuss the botany of that environment and how that relates to the overall degradation, then I discuss the nature of the wind currents that affect both flora and fauna, including the overall physics of the question and why I don’t quite understand the math involved and beg for someone to explain it to me, before I circle back to talk about the reproductive life of the elephant (affected by environmental degradation) in joky and slightly salacious terms* and then conclude, for reasons clear to myself but not to my readers, with an analysis of the metaphoric uses of the elephant in human social orders, particularly in pop culture and in printed literature including the memorably insane tome distributed free of charge by a mysterious stranger one year at the American Academy of Religion conference, “I Have Found an Elephant in the Bible.”
All of these are perfectly valid topics for discussion, but cramming them all into 1500 words is a bit much. No wonder nobody has understood my main points in six years of my trying to make them.
Are you still reading this? Good, because I will give ten dollars to the first forty people who…no, actually, I won’t.
*Jeff Kripal engages in similarly serious discourse punctuated by jokiness and occasional decorous salaciousness. He’s my kind of writer.
